Necessarily, as the person of Christ is the truth, if His person is defamed, the very core is corrupted. And such we have seen to be the fact with Irvingism. They are unsound, not on this or that side merely, but in the heart and center of all revealed truth. The spirit which built up their system throughout, which they accepted as the voice of God, affirmed the doctrine of Christ's fallen humanity. It is therefore an impossibility for the society to purge itself from this root of error as for Popery, when once committed; because it would be to own that their boast of infallible guidance is false and a delusion of the enemy. They are bound, wrapt up, and blinded by this spurious self-security, to persevere in every evil thought into which the spirit of error can drag them.
And so in fact it is found. For, whilst they have a vast deal of truth with which they are occupied beyond the various denominations of Christendom, they are steeped in error beyond ordinary example. What they hold of truth is, so far as I have observed, invariably tainted, so as to exceed in malignity the traditional creeds even of those most mistaken. Again, their pretension to what not even Popery or the Greek system, still less any Protestant body claims, exposes them both to the setting up of lifeless forms and to the snare of a reality of power from beneath which distinguishes them most painfully.
The proof of what is here stated will be apparent from a few citations out of the “Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord's Human Nature.”
“ Now that Christ is a sinless person we all admit, and how then could He reach death? He could not reach it by coming in a sinless and unfallen nature, such as Adam's for such a nature, not having sinned, could not die, without making death void as the great sign of God's holiness. To reach death there is no other way but by coming in the nature of a sinful creature; in that nature which, having sinned, did underlie the curse of death. with His holy person He inform this nature, He may die; nay He must die: for when human nature was sentenced in the person of Adam to death, it was all sentenced, every particle of it whatever; and the death of it is the grand demonstration of God's holy hatred and final judgment against sin. And therefore, agreeing that the death of the clean and innocent Lamb of God is the means unto our redemption or atonement, I say it could not be otherwise reached but through His taking humanity, fallen, sinful, and under sentence of death” (p. 91). Any believer ought to see through this poor human reasoning, which disproves itself because it destroys the grace of Christ's death. For if He must die, His death was only at most a little before its time. But to pursue from page 95. “How, it may be said, is this an atonement for me? It seems to be no more than a bearing of the infirmities of His own human nature; it seems to be no more than a righteousness wrought in His own human nature for it. I answer, There is but one human nature: it is not mine, it is not thine, it is not His; it is the common unity of our being. Bare He the infirmities of human nature? He bare the sins of all men. Bare He the infirmities of human nature? He bare the infirmities of all men. Overcame He the enemies of human nature, sin, death, and the devil? He overcame the enemies of all men. Took He them captive? They are at large no more; they are impotent, they are as nothing, and ought so to be preached of. He hath abolished death; He hath taken away sin; 'He hath judged the prince of this world.' Whether this be new doctrine or not, I appeal to the Epistles of Paul; whether it be new in the reformed church, I appeal to the writings of Martin Luther.
“I know how far wide of the mark these views of Christ's act in the flesh will be viewed by those who are working with the stockjobbing theology of the religious world—that God wanted punishment, and an infinite amount of it; which Christ gave for so many; and so He is satisfied, and they escape from His anger, which flames as hot as ever against all beyond this pale. And this you call preaching the free grace of God, the justice of God, the work of Christ, the doctrine of election, atonement, &c.! Yet one word as to suffering. The atonement, upon this popular scheme, is made to consist in suffering; and the amount of suffering is cried up to infinity. Now I utterly deny that anything suffered but the human nature of Christ; and that could only suffer according to the measure of a man: more, no doubt, than unholy men like us suffer, because He was perfectly holy, and so. His soul felt the smart of every pang manifold of what we do; but still it was only according to the measure of a holy man. If more, whence came it? From the divine nature? But this is contrary to all sound doctrine that the Godhead should be capable of passions. Well, let these preachers—for I will not call them divines or theologians—broker-like, cry up their article, it will not do: it is but the sufferings of a perfectly holy man, treated by God and by men as if He were a transgressor.” Here every moderately taught Christian will feel into what ignorance and contempt of the truth Irving was plunged by his idol dogma, to say nothing of the grossest dividing of Christ's person.
But take another specimen from p. 98, which ought to alarm some too sure of their own soundness: “very poor wit have they, and a most barbarous idea of God, who will represent this sublime, stupendous action of Godhead as taking place to appease the wrath of Godhead, which verily takes place to manifest the love and grace and mercy of Godhead.
Why, what mean they? It is God Who doth the thing. And why doth He it, but because it is godly so to do? Love and grace are in Him; of His essence, of His ancient eternal essence, which is unchangeable. If they are of Him and in Him now, they have been of Him and in Him forever. And out of the fountain of His love cometh that stream, hiding its head in darkness for a while, that it may wash the very foundations of the base world, and appear in light and glory unpolluted, the life, the beauty, of this redeemed world. But what a system of theology is that which representeth God as in Himself implacable to the sinner, until His Son, by bearing the sinner's strokes, doth draw off the revenge of God? Then God is changed in His being with respect to a few; but with respect to the many His implacable nature worketh on in its natural course. Such a God cannot be the object of love; and upon such a system an object of love He never is. And all this they represent as needful for the glory of His holiness and justice.” It is needless to say that this grievous misrepresentation of the truth springs simply from Irving's heterodoxy which made him caricature the divine judgment of sin and cleave to his own exaggeration and one-sidedness.
An extract from p. 99 may be well. “In whatever light these remarks may appear to others, to myself they have brought this solid conviction, That while the present views of atonement continue to be doted on by the church, it is in vain to attempt to carry any point of sound doctrine.” This witness is true, though in an opposite direction. So vital is the doctrine of atonement, that all else is sure to be shaken where it is false, and established where it is true. As the person of Christ is bound up with it, so all the communion, walk, and worship depend on it. In what follows the reader will observe that the same fundamental error re-appears as in our day. “Atonement and redemption are the names for the bearing of Christ's work upon the sinner! and have no respect to its bearing upon the Godhead!, nor upon Christ, the God-man!! and on that account, instead of occupying the first and highest place in theology, they should occupy the third only, being preceded by the glory of God, and the glory of Christ.”
One more from p. 116 must suffice. “The man who will put a fiction [this is the way imputation of sin is treated], whether legal or theological, a make-believe into his idea of God, I have done with; he who will make God consider a person to be that which he is not, I have done with.” Compare what the apostle lays down in Rom. 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13. It is evident not only that atonement and reconciliation are confounded, but that atonement is nullified, and that reconciliation is wholly misunderstood and depraved.
The bearing of their fundamental heterodoxy as to Christ's person on His atoning work is absolutely destructive of its truth. Propitiation is lost as well as substitution, the two essential sides of the truth adumbrated by the great Day of Atonement in Israel. It is in vain to say that Mr. Irving or others did not mean this. The question is, what the enemy meant who beguiled them. They were carried utterly away by a vain dream which shut them out from the healthful workings of the word of God, and committed to a torrent of error which can readily find appearances to sanction every wild imagination, and ingeniously bound over the firmest obstacle. The Holy Spirit gives subjection to scripture by keeping the soul in self-distrust looking only to Christ and His glory. But here the essential difference of Christ is ignored. His being personally in the Father, and the Father in Him, they confound with what we may enjoy in the Spirit by faith. So that in general we may say that their system debases the Second man as it exalts the first, and is thus at perpetual and incurable issue with God's mind. In fact, it is the old quarrel of Satan with God. In the last paper we saw that their doctrinal basis is the Son's assumption of fallen or sinful humanity, and His work victory over it in the Spirit, thereby rendering it holy and acceptable to God. They may say other things which sound fair and good; but this which the spirit among them expressly sanctioned as the truth overthrows both the person and the work of Christ. No doubt some of them learned to speak more guardedly and condemned more or less the outspoken language of Mr. Irving; but the doctrine characterized them as distinctly as the claim of the restored apostolate, prophets, and other gifts in their ecclesiastical polity, notwithstanding their desperate efforts after secrecy save with the initiated. Hence the, infinite sufferings of the cross are ignored or even decried; hence the railing and ridicule heaped on the substitution of Christ, on the imputation of righteousness to the believer, in short on all that the Christian elect of God have found most solemn and precious in and through the Savior's death. Even if His death or blood be referred to, it is to put all the race upon one, level of redemption and forgiveness: as to this the special blessings of the faithful are nowhere. How could it be other wise if the Son of God took fallen sinful humanity into union with Himself? Its reconciliation must then supplant propitiation, and reconciliation itself be confounded with atonement; as is verbally done indeed by unhappy errors of the A.V. in both the Old Testament and the New. And their fatal result is that reconciliation is thus rendered altogether vague and impersonal, the reconciliation of humanity, instead of its being the enjoyed and exclusive portion of those who actually believe. Finally, holiness is as much lost by this misbelieving scheme as righteousness; for it takes as into the falsehood of improving and perfecting by the power of the Holy Spirit that old man which, according to scripture, is irreparably evil, the mind of which is enmity against God and is not subject to His law, neither indeed can be. Now whatever the moral perfection of our Lord in the days of His flesh, it is in resurrection only that He becomes Head of the new creation. Till He died atoningly, He abode alone. Only after sin was judged in the cross is He “the beginning,” and bears much fruit. His living relationship is with the sanctified, not with the race.